♂Uriah Howard

Uriah Howard (about December 1763 – 9 July 1845) was a Revolutionary War soldier, born at Hebron, Connecticut, who served two six-month tours from Lyme, New Hampshire, and settled in the hill town of Phillips, Maine, where he died. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Sybil Howard (1784–1864).

The war

In his own pension declaration Uriah swore that he was born at Hebron, Connecticut, and that he enlisted twice at Lyme, New Hampshire: first for six months in Capt. Samuel Paine’s company under Major Whitcomb, stationed on the Connecticut River, and in May 1781 for six months in Capt. Charles Nelson’s company of Col. Benjamin Waite’s Vermont regiment, stationed at Corinth. His brother Joseph Howard, then seventy-four, swore that in 1781 the two of them “lived at Lyme … in the same family”. The pension office credited him with twelve months’ service in all.

A Massachusetts roll lists a three-year enlistment that Uriah’s own sworn account does not mention, and it seems likely that the soldier on that roll was a different man. The state’s printed roll of its Revolutionary soldiers lists “Uriel Howard”, a private in the 7th company of Col. Thomas Nixon^W’s 6th Massachusetts regiment, enlisted for three years from 20 June 1778 and credited to the town of Douglas, Massachusetts, serving to the end of 1779: in camp near Peekskill in February 1779, in the Highlands of the Hudson that May, and at the post called Soldier’s Fortune in November and December. A Maine veterans’ grave record identifies that roll entry as the Uriah Howard buried at Phillips, but a man with three years in the Continental Army would be expected to have claimed them, and the Douglas town records contain no Uriah or Uriel Howard. His birth month and year come from the age recorded on the cemetery card for his stone, 81 years and 7 months; a Find a Grave index gives the day as 9 December 1763.

Family and Maine

A Roswell Howard of Lyme, New Hampshire, who according to the New Hampshire Revolutionary War index enlisted in April 1777, died in the service on 12 June 1778, eight days before the Massachusetts roll’s enlistment date; Uriah later gave the name Roswell to his eldest son. The records do not say whether the two were related.

Uriah married Lydia Royce (1767–1851), who was born at Hanover, New Hampshire, on 6 June 1767 according to the state’s birth index. They married on 20 May 1783 at Dorchester, New Hampshire, as she swore in her widow’s claim; she was then about two weeks short of her sixteenth birthday. Their daughter Sybil was born on 26 September 1784, and a family record of the children’s births, copied from a Bible said to be in Uriah’s own hand, was filed with the pension papers. In the census of 1790 Uriah Howard was the head of a household of four at Lyme, next to Hanover, among eleven Howard households listed together there, one of them a Joseph Howard living alone. The Phillips town record, as indexed, lists thirteen children born between 1784 and 1811, among them twin sons born in 1789. The censuses later gave Sybil’s and Roswell’s birthplaces as New Hampshire. A lineage application of 1942 cites the pension roll of 1833, on which a Uriah A. Howard was placed in January of that year, and a FamilySearch index of the 1840 roster of Revolutionary War pensioners lists him at Phillips.

Uriah’s move from Lyme went by way of Winthrop. In his 1832 declaration he said that his home was at Lyme during the Revolution, that he moved from there to Winthrop, Maine, in 1797, and two years later to Phillips. His brother Joseph testified in February 1846 that Uriah and Lydia had lived at Joseph’s house in Lyme from 1783 until they moved to Phillips.

Death

A Maine cemetery card records that Uriah died at Phillips on 9 July 1845 and was buried in Riverside Cemetery there. The lot holds Lydia, who died in 1851; their daughter Sybil Clough, who died in 1864; and a Joseph Howard who died in 1848, aged 92 on his cemetery card, whose relationship the stones do not state. After his death Lydia applied for a widow’s pension on his service.

Notes

A lineage application of 1942 gives his birthplace as a New Hampshire town whose name is hard to read, possibly Lynn, and another lineage society has Lyme; his own declaration settles it as Hebron, Connecticut. Lydia gave her maiden name as Rice in her own widow’s deposition of 1846, as the 1942 application does; the New Hampshire birth record has Royce, and Chase’s 1891 history of Hanover gives the family name as Royce or Rice. Compiled family trees make him a son of Daniel Howard, born at Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1724, and Sarah Backus; the pension file names his brother Joseph but not his parents, so that remains unproven. A history of Maine place names gives Buckfield and about 1805 for his move to Phillips, which does not agree with his own 1832 declaration. Joseph’s ages in his testimony, 74 in August 1832 and 88 in February 1846, put his birth about 1757 or 1758, so he would have been about 90 at his death in 1848, not 92 as the cemetery card gives.